recent, current and future musical activity from Christopher Fox and the Fox Edition

About foxedition

This site is the main source of information about my work, and also offers musings on works-in-progress. Here are a few bars from Caoineadh, just finished and now being copied:

There are lists of everything published by the Fox Edition, forthcoming performances, and information about my writing, including some articles that aren’t so easy to find elsewhere. There are recordings, including the late Bob Gilmore’s documentary on my music, from his remarkable Tentative Affinities project, and links to other material, such as this YouTube clip of Xenia Pestova‘s premiere of my little toy piano piece, Digitalis Purpurea. The site is updated regularly but the topical content is not archived.

Last year saw the publication of the book about my music that Rose Dodd so painstakingly put together,Perspectives on the Music of Christopher Fox – Straight Lines in Broken Times. It’s published by Routledge at an eye-watering price that suggests that university libraries are likely to be the book’s main purchaser, but it’s a great privilege to have my work discussed by Monty Adkins, Nikki McGavin, Stephen Chase, Bob Gilmore, Roger Heaton, Bjorn Heile, Claudia Molitor, Philip Thomas, and of course, Rose herself. Arnold Whittall’s review of the book in the Summer 2017 issue of Musical Times concludes that ‘Fox’s bold estrangement of the most basic elements of classical connectedness brings experimental cool into productive interchange with that modernist turbulence, and helps to highlight his skill at crossing borders considered insurmountable by more mainstream modernists.’

Not in the book, of course, is anything about my most recent music, of which the Topophony works are the most substantial. Ilan Volkov has conducted three performances of the orchestral Topophony, withthe BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the WDR Symphony Orchestra, and the Athens State Orchestra, with soloists Rhodri Davies (Glasgow – a clip from the BBC SSO performance is still on the orchestra’s web-pages), Axel Dörner and Paul Lovens (Cologne) and Fred Frith (Athens). In May Ilan and the WDR Orchestra made a wonderful recording of the work, both of the orchestral music alone and a version with John Butcher and Thomas Lehn, and we hope that this will eventually come out on CD. Ilan also premiered the chamber orchestral Topophony with Yoni Silver and Ram Gabay with the Israel Contemporary Players on 7 January 2017 and will conduct it again in November with Ensemble Modern, Rhodri and Thomas.

There are other new CDs too: Irene Kurka’s beautiful recording of ‘Showing and Telling’ from the Too Far cycle has just been released on Wandelweiser, and Heather Roche’s wonderful new recordings of eight of my clarinet works from 1980 to 2015 – a sort of single-reed autobiography – will be released in February next year. Also recently confirmed are a run of premieres in November in Berlin (the electric guitar quartet e-werk playing Untergrundnetz mit Sternenlicht), at November Music (Philip Thomas playing senza misura), and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (Serge Vuile with untouch-touch). As ever, I am deeply grateful to performers and promoters for turning my music into reality.